I agree that a simple integer number which gives the elapsed seconds is much more handy if you want to collocate later etc. I am also struggling a little bit to find conversion tools for those different formats. Does anybody have experience with those things or knows what to look for exactly? Ideally it should be something in fortran which could be easily linked in the preprocessing so that everything after that step is uniform wrt time.
Matthias
-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: ORAC Developers [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Im Auftrag von Richard Siddans
Gesendet: Donnerstag, 14. Juni 2012 15:31
An: [log in to unmask]
Betreff: Re: Time information
I don't know about the difference between UTC and TAI but I would definitely favour storing time+date as a elapsed seconds since a given date (double precision value).
1/1/70 as per AVHRR seems a sensible start date for this application.
I don't think its a good idea to store times as just an HHMMSS string.
It might be easy to read by eye but is very messy to handle computationally.
Richard
-----------------
Richard Siddans ([log in to unmask])
Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Chilton OX11 0QX, U.K.
Tel: (44) (0)1235 446428
Fax: (44) (0)1235 445848
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ORAC Developers [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
> Caroline Poulsen
> Sent: 14 June 2012 13:58
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Time information
>
> Hi Matthias,
> just looked at the data definition document and cut and pasted the
> below
>
>
> The identifying time for this data set in UTC.
>
> Format is [HH[MM[SS]]] where HH is the two digit hour from 00 to 23,
> MM is the two digit minute from 00 to 59 and SS is the two digit
> second from 00 to 59.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ORAC Developers [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
> Jerg Matthias
> Sent: 14 June 2012 13:37
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Time information
>
> Hello everybody,
>
> I included the reading and "computation" of time information for MODIS
> and AVHRR for each pixel (line). However, it is not clear to me what
> time standard that is. E.g. MODIS uses TAI (international atmosc time)
> with reference 1.1.1993, AVHRR seems to use 1.1.1970 but I do not know
> the time standard, e.g. UTC or TAI. TAI and UTC seem to differe in the
> sense that UTC has leap seconds included, TAI doesn't ave that. I also
> would not presently know how to transform those standards into one
> another. It is also not clear to me what we are supposed to use or
> what AATSR uses.
>
> Anyway, the additional code has just been added to the repository and
> is online now.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Matthias